Major Challenges in Web-Based Application Testing

Web Testing mainly focuses on web-based applications. Web-based application testing before the application is deployed to the market can help the company to determine the issues and it makes an application better before launched.

Basically the company launches a beta version of the product before releasing it which helps them to understand the defects in that application on the user prospective.

Main steps followed for testing  web base applications

First, understand the design of the application. It is very important to understand all the components of the application like where is the application basically hosted and how it is connected. Instead understand any of the application components installed in the local machines.

It also helps in planning to understand how the components work with each other. Test Planning: Make a plan document and also involve the development team so that the risks of the application can be documented and discussed. Test environment planning is also very important in this case.

Test the application from the user prospective. Make a plan for user acceptance testing of the application.

Testing web applications is different because a Web application can handle the large amount of users. Web Applications can also be exposed to a wide range of security threats and it may start the illegal points of entry into the databases and other running systems holding the sensitive information.

To make sure that the web application works properly under various situations the previously mentioned factors need to be implemented for testing. Hence during testing it needs substantial efforts in Test Planning and Test Design. A tester should write the test cases covering all the various scenarios as functional usage but the tester must also test the application for various technical considerations such as network speeds, response time and screen resolution etc. 

Web Applications mainly give errors in slow speed networks, on the other hand the application can perform well on high-speed connections. Basically Images on the application will take longer to download for slower networks, so that the user's perspective of the application may be different or that it is not good.

Testing a web-based application is challenging. Web-based application testing is not different from the testing of software applications. In this the purpose is to find the errors and defects in the applications before deployment on Internet or Intranet.

The major challenges in testing web-based applications are as follows:

To test the applications in various browsers as the end user prospective and also the user can use the Web application using various or a wide range of connection speeds. To do this we have various tools like selenium etc. in the market.

In web-based applications the business environment plays a key role in the testing, especially in the case of e-commerce web applications. In those applications the issues like tax calculation, shipping costs determination, completing and executing financial transactions, tracking of customer profiles.

Another major challenge is testing under the various Testing Environments. Web-based application testing is very expensive and time consuming because we require the same or a duplicate production environment which are web servers, application servers, and database servers that are basically required to ensure the quality and test the web applications.

In the web application security is one of the major challenges that a application faces because the web-based application is running on the Internet or Intranet and it is open to the entire world. Therefore protection from unauthorized access to the application is very crucial and it will help the application to be protected from hackers.

Web components in an application are developed by various companies and are integrated to the applications based on business need. The integration of these components can result in the malfunctioning in an application, therefore integration testing of these components are very important and the very biggest challenges for the web testers.

Another challenge to testing web applications is compatibility with various browsers because today many browsers are being used in the market and each has its own function and behavior. Sometimes it is possibile for an application to change its look in various browsers. So to ensure the application can work or look as the end user requires, testers need to do compatibility testing. The Ranorex Test Suit Runner is a popular tool also used in various browsers for this type of testing.

Many more challenges exist with web-based applications such as performance, usability, scalability, conformance, reliability and system testing. The more complex a web application is, the more it requires effort to test it.

References

sciencedirect.com
ddifrontline.com
webmove.org
ranorex.com
xbosoft.com